THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

I wanted to like Jorie Graham’s Sea Change more than I really like it. I firmly believe in addressing our climate crisis with poetry as an important tool, and I also like the visual experiment of her two-pronged lines. The very long lines spilling on top of the very short lines — the left margin of the shorter lines begins in the middle of the page — creates a compelling asymmetry, a disorder or partial order that mimics the ecological processes she’s writing about. But the gaze remains too earth bound to really wow me.

She’s got some nice lines here, driven by careful focus and particularity of vision, as when she writes about the boundary between self and world through recognizing

how the world is our law, this indrifting of us

into us, a chorusing in us of elements, & how the

intermingling of us lacks in-

telligence…

Perhaps it’s just that my blue water vision balks at too many leaves & branches, but the stronger poems here are really about midwestern winters and out of season blooms. She has one pretty good invocation of the deep blue in the poem “Full Fathom” —

…hiss of incomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean and its

nothing else: nothing in the above visible except

water

Of course I stumble over her “flat,” which is what the surface of the ocean never is, but she makes nice hash of Ariel’s anthem — “those were houses that were his eyes”; “there is a form of slavery in everything” — and struggles compellingly with the imposing meta narratives of climate change.

This novelistic portrait of the Sundarbans, the massive swamp delta and mangrove forest at the mouth the Ganges on the border of India and Bangladesh, overflows with riches, including a smartly-handled love triangle that involves an American grad student doing field work on river dolphins, a fisherman with whom she shares no common language, and an urbane, egotistical translator who is also a descendent of the idealistic Indian couple who built the only hospital in the area. Plus a wonderful political back-plot of exploitation and eco-politics, a through-line about translation of Rilke, some gorgeous descriptive writing, and perhaps the best storm scene I’ve come across in 21c English prose.

No reason not to start with the storm. It arrives as a plot-mechanism and in due course clears the overcrowded decks of the love plot. But part of the appeal of this novel is to employ traditional devices — poetic allegory? symbolic animals? a brutal land-grab? — in ways that don’t have to be novel to be moving. When our triad gets separated by the storm, with the wordly translator wading ashore in Lusibari and losing an important manuscript in the flood, while the dolphin-researcher and the fisherman cling to the top of a tree during the two phases of the cyclone — first before, then after, the stillness of the eye — it’s impossible not to be transfixed by sheer narrative force, a whirlwind in itself. What happens simply must happen, or so the narrative makes us believe in the middle of the storm —

But something had changed and it took Piya a moment to register the difference. The wind was now coming at them from the opposite direction. Where she had had the tree trunk to shelter her before, now there was only Fokir’s body. Was this why he had been looking for a branch on another tree? Had he known right from the start that his own body would have to become her shield when the eye had passed?…She could feel the bones of his cheeks as if they had been superimposed on her own; it was as if the storm had given them what life could not; it had fused them together and made them one. (321)

There are other great touches here, including a wonderful description of a grad student finding a life’s project in obscure but meaningful research — “it would be enough; as an alibi for a life, it would do” (106) — plus a great poetic image of the tide country as a book whose pages dissolve everything they encounter, including themselves (186).

An interesting eco-twist on the political plot also: poor refugees are displaced and eventually massacre because the area on which they are squatting must be preserved as a wildlife refuge. Which leads to some interesting speculation about political, if not biological, differences between humans and animals —

As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil. No one could think this a crime unless they have forgotten that this is how humans have always lived — by fishing, clearing land, and by planting to soil. (217)

Plus I have always loved river dolphins, ever since I caught the barest glimpse of one on the Mahakahm River in Borneo, when I was sitting on top of a river ferry in early 1990. Ghosh, oddly, does not mention that the Orcaella brevirostris also lives in Indonesia.

Just read Mat Johnson’s new satiric novel Pym, which riffs off Poe and more modern trends in Antarctic exploration. The big fish in this sea, as we might expect, is “whiteness,” and “recently canned” lit professor Chris Jaynes heads south to find it. Along the way he finds the skeleton of Dirk Peters and the still-living Arthur Gordon Pym himself, as well as the Yeti-smelling “snow honkies” of Tekeli-li.

It’s a lively, fast-paced novel that wants to be more than it is. The ex-professorly voice is fun, esp when the narrator assumes a pan-academic vision & re-contextualizes, esp at the opening of many chapters –“I am bored with the topic of Atlantic slavery” (160); “I have always loved quitting jobs” (216); “Always thought if I didn’t get tenure I would shoot myself or strap a bomb to my chest and walk into the faculty cafeteria…” (7).

Johnson wants to do what Toni Morrison says is a fundamental task for the study of American literature — figure out what whiteness is. Sometimes the cartoonishness of the characters and the narrative — snow monsters! apocalypse! reclusive artists! inter-species sex! — gets away from him. I must say, though, he writes a nice final paragraph, when the sole survivors of the southern expedition (and perhaps of the civilized world) arrive on the shores of Poe’s all-black island —

Rising up in our pathway was a man. He was naked except for a cloth that covered his loins. He was of normal proportions, and he was shaking his hand in the air, waving it, and we, relieved, waved ours back at him. Past him, minutes later, we saw that he was joined in welcoming us by others, women, more men, and the offspring both had managed. Whether this was Tsalal or not, however, Garth and I could make no judgments. On the shore all I could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority. (222)

As the rhythm of those sentences suggest, Johnson’s at his best when he’s channeling Poe, and the faux-lit crit passages early in the novel are great fun. I do think, though, that it may have been a mistake on my part to re-read The Narrative itself before embarking on Pym. Johnson does a find job summarizing Poe, but it’s hard to match EAP’s combination of foreboding and claustrophobia. Many of Poe’s scenes, of imprisonment, cannibalism, madness, get re-configured here.

There’s a future syllabus here, too — Poe to Life of Pi to Pym. Lots of Richard Parkers to chew on.

Lots of time to read in between swims at Jost van Dyke, & one highlight was returning after many years — the late 1980s? — to Peter Matthiessen’s turtling epic Far Tortuga. Just great stuff, with an island lilt that I also almost heard in taxis & around the island.

He a wind coptin, dass de trouble. He a sailin mon, and he used to de old-time way. All his life he been ziggin and zaggin, he don’t know how to go straight. (121)

There’s a modern Moby-Dick in the story of Copm Raib’s rag-tag crew of failed turtle fishers rousting about the southwest Caribbean, from home on Grand Cayman to the coasts of Honduras & Nicaragua to “Misteriosa Cay,” the legendary Far Tortuga.

The climactic scene, in which Raib sails the Lillias Eden, a former schooner now fitted out with deisels but still flying canvas from stumps of masts, out through the reefs at night to escape a murderous band of Jamaican cut-throats, is thrilling & gorgeous. He’s up in the rigging, stearing by moonlight, Speedy’s at “the blind helm” (360), they make it most of the way through “white wraiths of reef” (361), & “the Captain flings his free arm wide, exalted. SHE CLEAR, SHE CLEAR! WE IN DE CLEAR! (361).

The ship strikes.

Only one, of course, is left to tell the tale. As Speedy has already said

Maritime lit types like me have been waiting for a little while for Margaret Cohen’s new book. It was worth waiting for. She covers several centuries of English and French literature, with major treatments of Defoe, Melville, Hugo, Conrad, and many others.

The really great thing about the book, esp its quite amazing first chapter, is the focus on what she calls “mariner’s craft.” Taking an episode in which Cook manages to get his ship off a reef in the South Pacific as the focalizing narrative, Cohen outlines the 14 central feature of the skilled labor that Homer called “metis.” From Prudence and sea-legs through jury-rigging and collectivity to Providence and practical reason, she produces a wonderfully detailed vision of how sailors imagined themselves working on the sea.

The bulk of the book connects that collective knowledge , assembled by generations of writers and sailors — the quote I use as a title for this post is from Champlain — to help understand the international maritime novel. Her readings of Defoe, Conrad, and Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea (which she rightly notes should be translated as “Workers of the Sea”) are especially good. Conrad writes “craft’s eulogy,” she observes, and Falconer’s poem “The Shipwreck” attempts to connect maritime craft to the emerging aesthetics of the sublime (122-5).

I also appreciate the final gestures toward Pynchon’s Whole Sick Crew. Who will write the much-needed study of old Tom as sea-writer?

Another plane book from my travels in January, this one is MIT anthropologist Stefan Helmriech’s travels and adventures with marine macrobial biologists in and under the oceans. Some great stuff about what’s happening in Woods Hole and Monterey.

The takeaway is that the macrobial life in the ocean is much vaster and more complex that we’ve hitherto imagined. A mililiter of sea water “in a genetic sense, has more complexity than the human genome” (53).

It’s also a story about the shifting of human interest in marine life away from anthropomorphic mammals, from whales to dolphins and now to microbes (5-6).

Some comments also remind me that I need to re-read Lem’s novel Solaris.

I read Graham Harman’s study of Latour, Prince of Networks, while traveling last month & have been meaning to say a couple quick things about it. It’s a lively survey of Latour’s work, plus an engaged defense of object-oriented metaphysics that at times gets pretty deep into philosophical weeds. I very much like Harman’s attempt to break down the old human/nonhuman barrier, & his sense that Latour’s ANT-work has been blazing this path for a little while.

But what I like most about Harman’s book is it’s style & energy, & its defense of good writing as “the best tool we have for exposing the unstated assumptions that lie behind any surface proposition” (169). Or, more elegantly,

Against the program for philosophy written in “good plain English,” I hold that it should be written in good vivid English. Plain speech contains clear statements that are forgotten as soon as their spokesman closes his mouth, since they have already said all that they are capable of saying. But vivid speech forges new concepts that take on a life of their own, like good fictional characters.

I do wonder if that gesture toward fictional characters could be unpacked a bit, but I like the overall move.

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Congratulations to literature scholar, digital humanities innovator, and two-time @NEH_ODH grantee Dr. Katherine Rowe, named the new president of the College of @williamandmary. https://t.co/EFDCzeKEX5